Prior to joining Matrix in 2016, Ilya worked on three startups, all of which were acquired.

Most recently, he was the co-founder and CEO of Parse, a cloud platform for mobile developers that was acquired by Facebook in 2013. In addition to running Parse as a semi-independent subsidiary, Ilya led the teams responsible for all of Facebook's developer-facing products and worked on Messenger. He's an active angel investor and was a part-time partner at Y Combinator. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Ilya invests across a variety of sectors, but is particularly interested in products that leverage hard technical underpinnings to become indispensable to consumers or developers. He's excited to work with hackers who are building mission-driven and engineering-centric companies. Read more about Ilya on his website and watch some of his talks here.